Modern vehicles have systems with an ever larger number of different control units which are interconnected with one another. In such a system, an error within one of the control units may have a detrimental effect on the function of other control units or even on the entire system.
A device for error storage in a control unit of a motor vehicle is described in the publication German Patent No. 41 18 692. This device includes an error-time counter module for detecting the respective time period in which the error continues and an error memory for saving error information.
German Published Patent Application No. 100 36 278 describes a method for monitoring a program execution via a debug logic. In order to provide a particularly reliable, but nonetheless as much as possible resource-saving monitoring of an execution of a program able to run on a microprocessor, it is here provided for the debug logic to be configured by the microprocessor and for the debug logic to perform an exception routine following a triggering of an exception condition during a program run.